Mercy Strategy 57that damage to a specific area of the left frontal cortex impaired speech.
These patients remembered individual words, but they could no longer
assemble them into sentences.
Having started with a study of words, neuropsychology grew up with a
sort of linguistic bias, referring all brain functions to the fundamental
behavior of speech. For instance, the left hemisphere was called the verbal
hemisphere, because it contained the centers of speech. The right
hemisphere, in contrast, was called the non-verbal hemisphere, indicating
its supporting role in the general understanding of the mind.
This book, in contrast, begins by looking at Mercy strategy, the
ultimate non-verbal mode of thought. Neurology built its understanding of
the mind around the core concept of speech—located within the bottom
half of the left hemisphere. We, on the other hand, are beginning our
discussion of the mind with Mercy thought, which appears to be located in
exactly the opposite side of the brain.
I suggest that there is a mental reason for this difference in approach.
As we will see later, humans find it easiest to use logical thought in areas
where the Mercy emotions of everyday life do not intrude. This is why
universities generally turn into „ivory castles,‟ distant from the feelings of
normal life. Therefore, it makes sense that the research of neuropsychology
would begin with speech—an aspect of human thought which is both
obvious and separate from Mercy thought and feelings.
One more problem emerges when trying to decipher the evidence of
neurology. Generally speaking, the data falls into two different categories.
On the one hand, when looking at specific brain regions, neurologists
generally do not distinguish between the operation of the left and right
hemispheres.A For instance, when referring to the functioning of the
orbitofrontal cortex,B they usually lump together the region in the right
hemisphere with the one in the left and treat the two halves as one
indivisible unit.
On the other hand, those who do compare the functioning of the left
hemisphere with the operation of the right hemisphere usually talk in
general terms, referring at most to the front or the back of the cortex.
So, let us see what we can discover. We begin with a brief digression
into basic neuroanatomy. First, if you look at a human brain, you notice
immediately a division between the left and the right hemisphere. And,
even a layman can tell you that the left hemisphere operates analytically
A There is one exception. When looking at the human brain, neurologists
do make a clear distinction between the right and left parietal lobes and
between the right and left temporal lobes. Here it is easy to find the
correspondence between cognitive styles and brain location.
B The orbitofrontal cortex is located right above the orbits of the eyes—
hence the name. It is the lowest region of the inferior frontal cortex.